Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Barbara DeBuono, president and C.E.O. of Orbis International, a global group that helps treat and prevent blindness. She says that while new leaders should articulate goals, they may need six months to a year to learn about their organizations.

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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If the Cake Isn’t Ready, Just Say So.

Bryant: Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

DeBuono: I was a counselor at the local town camp, so I was the boss of a lot of 4-year-olds.  That’s probably my earliest memory of being in charge of something. I had about 15 or 20 of them, and I really loved it.  I remember people saying, “You’re really good at this.”  And what was I good at?  It was the ability to wrangle these 4-year-olds and point them all in one common direction — “We’re going to do this.  We’re going to do that.  We’re going to go here.  We’re going to do that.”

As educators say, “You have to control your classroom.” That’s a very important element to teaching. You can’t have everybody doing their own thing and yelling and screaming and playing and throwing water balloons. So it was kind of like an early indication that I could control or at least manage a group.

Bryant: Any sense of where that came from?

DeBuono: My parents were both teachers, and they had gone through the process of becoming assistant principals and then principals, so they were my earliest role models for leadership.

Bryant: Even at that young age?

DeBuono: Yes, I watched and observed what they did all the time. I’ll never forget the time my mother brought me into the classroom where she had a bunch of sixth graders. I was definitely younger than the class, and I watched her teach long division. It was really quite a marvel. She was better than any teachers I’d ever had to that point. She had their attention, and she had a beginning, middle and end to the lesson plan.

I think it’s really amazing to have kids watch their parents in their jobs. You see them in a whole other context. You see how they interact with other people. You see how they command themselves, and you see them more objectively. It was a very valuable lesson for me.

Bryant: What else did you learn watching them?

DeBuono: A couple of things always struck me about watching my father as a principal. He always knew the name of every single student, and there were several hundred of them. He walked the halls constantly. This was an important lesson about leadership — you have to be visible.  You can’t hide in your office and close the door. My dad was very visible. And the way he delivered bad news or disciplined the students was brilliant. Instead of saying, “Jimmy, what the heck are you doing with that gum?  Get that out of your mouth,” he’d say: “Hey, Jimmy, I really want to hear you talk.  That chewing gum is keeping me from hearing all the great things you have to say.”

He was honest and transparent in a very kind way. So that kindness is another very important element of leadership — you have to convey humanity and humility.

Bryant: Let’s shift gears to your current work at Orbis, which you just joined this year. What changes are you making?

DeBuono: This is an organization that’s had a lot of changes in leadership.  And we have a huge set of issues to deal with, and it can feel overwhelming to people. I say to the staff all the time: “We’re going to get through this.  We’re going to figure this out.  It may take us a while, but we’re going to figure it out.  We will make sense of this.”  I’m a complete optimist about that.  I’m 30-some-odd years into my career, and I know I can do it, and I need to give them the confidence that we’ll do it.  So if I don’t believe it, and they see me rattled, that’s going to be completely destabilizing, and we’ll never move forward.

So I say to them: “Let’s deconstruct the problem. Let’s start from the beginning, and let’s just take it one by one by one by one.  We’re going to solve it.” That way it’s not scary to my staff anymore. That was a huge leadership lesson for me, to know that I can get through it, that I can do it.

Bryant:  Let’s talk about hiring. What are you looking for?

DeBuono:  I’ve always been really struck by how many people in organizations fight what their organization needs.  They say, in effect: “I’m not going to do that job. That’s not what I was hired for.”  And they say that even though the organization needs something else from them right now.

Bryant: Why do you think that is?

DeBuono: It’s what’s really important to them.  Is the future of the organization, the success of the organization, important to them?  Or is it really about them and their job and their livelihood and their paycheck?  That’s how I separate the wheat from the chaff. If I get a sense that a person feels and knows that the organization is bigger than them, and they really are passionate about the organization, they’ll do whatever it takes. And so if this is what the organization needs right now, they will do it.  I love when somebody even anticipates that — when I don’t have to tell them this is what the organization needs, and instead they’ve figured that out. That’s the kind of person I want.

I have to model that behavior, too, so that people see I’m doing what the organization requires. It’s just like my father. I felt that teachers stood up straighter, and the kids stood up straighter when he was walking through the hall — firm, confident — and calling people by their first name.

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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his new book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.